Motorola's next phone could look totally different than any previous model

Press renders allegedly showing Motorola’s upcoming Moto X smartphone were leaked on Sunday by Chinese Motorola blog hellomotoHK on its Google+ page, and it looks completely different than any Motorola smartphone we’ve seen before.

First off, the renders show metal smartphones, which Motorola hasn’t released before. The phones in the render also look identical to an alleged image of the Motorola Moto X that was leaked back in December last year, also by hellomotoHK.

According to notorious gadget leaker Evan Blass in a post on VentureBeat, there will be two new Moto X smartphones with some key differences. One will be a thicker model called “Vertex,” and the other will be thinner and called “Vector Thin.”

Blass also claims that you’ll be able to switch backplates with your own custom designs. That wouldn’t surprise us in the least, as one of Motorola’s signature smartphone features is its Moto Maker customisation tool that lets you choose colours and materials of your Moto X when you buy it.

Apparently, the thinner Vector Thin model will have all the premium specs, including:

However, Blass reports the new Moto X will have a very different feature than most phones. The two rows of dots along the devices’ bottom back are apparently connection ports that will let you connect modules, which Motorola will apparently call “Amps,” that add different functions to the devices.

The modules include:

Stereo speakers

A battery pack

A camera grip with flash and real optical zoom (as opposed to the fake digital zooming that degrades quality the more you zoom in)

A pico (tiny) projector

A rugged cover with a wide-angle lens attachment

It sounds similar to LG’s G5 smartphone, which has a removable bottom that lets you connect modules that do different things, like letting you swap out the battery with a fresh one, as well as a camera grip and an audio amp. Yet, the G5 forces you to turn the phone off as the modules and removable bottom are connected to the battery.

The new Moto X phones, as Blass claims, will attach to the devices magnetically, which means you can swap them in and out easily without turning off the phone or removing any part of the phone.

No official details of Motorola’s next smartphones exist yet, nor do we know when Motorola will announce them or how much they will cost. However, you can see the date “Fri August 24” on two of the devices’ screens, which is about a month later Motorola announced the 2015 Moto X.

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